Turning 30

“I am turning 30 in a couple of months, my parents are worried that I am still not married.” she said.

“Right, but are you?” I asked.

“Hmmm” she said, unsure about how she truly felt but feeling reasonably certain about how she was supposed to feel.

We were born as hunter gatherers with no grand purpose apart from existence. But over time, we started making up a lot of things to make “sense” of this existence.

One such theory (from the Hindu philosophy) is around dividing life into four stages: student life, household life, retired life and renounced life. This is directionally in line with our physiology as well.

As a consequence, there’s a window when most people study, marry, retire and renounce life. When we talk specifically about household life, conventionally this is defined as between ages 25 - 48 but with increased life expectancy and education, the window has shifted and expanded.

As a result, the “clock starts ticking” for people in their late 20s with it being loudest towards the end of that decade. So turning 30 becomes a milestone (if not a deadline) in a single person’s life, thanks to our conditioning, unless we choose to fight it.

Personally, I have a lot of admiration for people who fight this - no, not marriage but the conditioning that we must get married at a certain age.

I’ve seen this happen with my clients. I can tell when someone will be better off not complying to the template, but people don’t want to hear that, at least not from me, because they think they’re paying me to stuff them into the template, somehow.

But eventually, after years, some of them start living life at their own pace, embracing events as they unfold without the desire to pre-empt it. It’s beautiful. But it doesn’t happen overnight.

It happens as a result of a lot of exhaustion from trying to comply for years.

Turning 30 is like that point in a marathon when you have no idea if you’re closer to the start or the finish. You are on your own, running because you started, running because you don’t know what else to do and running because it’s now a part of you.

Occasionally you see someone run past you, and you start wondering if you should pick up pace. But now, competing starts to wear you out, so you don’t bother.

You are now running for yourself, not for your parents, not for your friends or for your society. You are running because you are curious to see if you’ll ever get to the finish.

But thinking about the finish is exhausting too, so you start distracting yourself with unrelated thoughts to take your mind of whatever you are doing. You hope with the passage of time, you’ll be a few meters ahead in the race.

But the finish line creeps back into your head, you try to fight it again.

You start focusing on the trees around you, the blue sky, the flowers around you or even just your own breathe. Every time a thought enters your head now, it’s easier to fight it, mostly because you’re breathing.

You focus on the present, live in the moment and you really start to feel more alive. You don’t care how far you’ve come or how much longer you’ve got. You are now running because you’re enjoying just the act of it.

This state of being single, I am in awe.

If you are single, on either side of 30, to you, I want to say …

Just breathe.

Married or not, you are still you.

You are beautiful the way you are.

Incomplete? Yes, we are all perpetually incomplete and a work in progress through the entirety of our lives.

If we were complete, we’d be dead.

You are not an accumulation of this incompleteness.

You are the incompleteness.

Every moment of the incompleteness is the whole.

Once this makes sense to you, you’ll start living.

My relationship with this newsletter is very volatile.

Within the first 5 months of beginning it in 2019, I found it exhausting to come back here week after week to write a “regular” newsletter. My creativity sat at odds with my discipline. I wanted out from this template.

Then someone said - oh write it when you like, but schedule it to go out on a particular day of the week. Problem solved.

I tried this for a year, but found this exhausting too.

Then I gave myself permission to write when I like and publish when I like.

Yet, I felt this profound sense of emptiness every time I published a post.

I thought the emptiness had something to do with the response to my posts or the lack of it. But that wasn’t the case. I came back to write even after some posts that barely garnered a few hundred views, with the exact same energy.

It did not make any sense.

Then I had this epiphany - I really enjoy the creative process of writing and engaging in this dance with my discipline to begin and finish a piece, over days, weeks or sometimes months.

But this creative process ends the moment I hit publish.

There after, I don’t have a relationship with this piece, and it becomes a stranger. So, naturally, the high diminishes exponentially. That’s it.

This realisation was liberating - here, volatility is a feature and not a bug.

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This applies to so many things in life.

Building a relationship is a creative process involving two unique individuals. The pace of co-creation or the manner in which you do it is unique to your relationship. But people don’t get this, and they say:

• Oh you’ve been married for two years, how come you don’t have kids?

• You are in your 40s, shouldn’t you be living in your own home by now?

• Oh my husband always helps around the house, you should train yours

…. and a million other absurd things.

You may truly enjoy the process of building a relationship with your partner, but with the pressure of trying to comply to this social template, you may abandon the process of co-creation altogether.

So it’s generally useful to become aware of what you enjoy and what you don’t, so you accept things as they are without trying to change them or yourself to “make it fit”.

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On this very lovely note, I wish you all a wonderful summer and I’ll see you all on the other side of the summer vacations.